For a second time a hush spread in a fluttering, whispering way over all the crowd, till they heard the footsteps of the twelve men returning. In the awful quiet the voice of the judge came now quite clearly as he read out the names of the prisoners. Robert Constable, Francis Bigod, George Lumley, John Bulmer, Margaret Cheyne, Robert Aske. To each name the jurors replied with the word, ‘Guilty.’
At the end the prisoners were asked, had they aught they would say, ‘Constable?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Bigod?’
‘Nothing, except – Nothing.’
‘Hammerton? Lumley?’ Each answered: ‘No.’
‘Aske?’
There was a little pause, for Aske was coughing. Then he said: ‘Nothing.’ And at last July knew that she had heard his voice.
The prisoners were brought back through crowded streets where people stared and nudged, whispering together, except where some prentice lads booed at the men, and whistled to make Meg look their way. Just inside Ludgate they were halted for a few moments because a horse was down, and the waggon, loaded with bulging sarplers of wool, blocked the way. The mounted archers’ horses came jostling back on the prisoners and then they all stood, in the open, bland heat of the day, for the sun was now high above the house-tops.
In the slight confusion Sir Robert Constable came abreast of Aske.
They had not met since they had been together at Templehurst, months ago, but Constable saw that Aske regarded him with as little interest as if they had parted yesterday.
‘Heart up, Cousin Aske,’ said Sir Robert, when Aske turned away a dull, indifferent eye; and then – ‘Look!’
Aske looked down where the other pointed, and saw, spilt upon the street close beside them, a handful of bluebells and red campion; some young creatures coming back from the fields this morning must have let them fall, for they were still quite fresh.
Sir Robert stooped quickly and picked them up. He smelt them, and laughed, as if at his own foolishness, and yet for pleasure too.
‘So sweet they smell,’ he said, ‘and bring to mind sweet things. Take some.’
But Aske shook his head as if he were angry, pushing Constable’s hand aside, and then the archers moved on, and they were separated.
*
That evening when Ned Stringer unlocked the door to tell Aske it was time for him to take his turn at the privy, he found the prisoner lying face downward on the straw, his forehead on his crossed arms.
‘Come, Master,’ he said, and turned away, to stand swinging his keys, awkwardly silent.
‘Come, Master,’ he said again, ‘I never thought I’d see you set down. What then? Do not we all die? And if the pains be sharp, yet they’re over before long.’ He looked round now, and saw that Aske was standing on his feet; he held out one hand towards Ned.
‘Here,’ said he, ‘take that if you will.’
Ned came nearer, and stared at the ring that lay on Aske’s palm. It was a very pretty thing, of gold, pearls, and enamel, green and white.
‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘I never saw that on your finger.’
‘I plaited threads from my shirt and hung it round my neck.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s a token from the King.’
‘What for? And you’d give it to me! What is it a token for?’
‘To promise me pardon for speaking the truth.’
Ned cried, ‘By Cock! You’re mad then – You’d give it to me? Why, man! there’s nothing to fear if you have the King’s token.’
Aske gave him a look which the old man could not make out; however he kept the ring and went away down the stairs.
When he came back Ned stared hard at his hands, but there was no ring on any finger.
‘What have you done with it?’ he cried.
‘Cast it down the privy.’
‘God’s Death! You did not!’
‘It meant,’ said Aske, ‘nothing.’
‘The King’s token – nothing?’
‘I am persuaded – nothing. And besides that,’ said Aske, as he sat down and let his head drop on his clenched fists, ‘it’s justice I want, not mercy. And there’s no justice, nor no mercy neither. None, I think, under the floor of heaven.’
May 18
It was not yet light indoors when the great gross old Doctor of Divinity from the Our Lady Friars in Fleet Street wallowed up the narrow turning stair of the Beauchamp Tower, blowing heavily. The warder stopped, and opened a door. The friar went in past him. Lord Darcy was in the room; he got up, as gaunt as the other was fat, so that they might have passed in a Morality for Gluttony and Abstinence.
‘I came betimes—’ said the friar, still gasping.
‘I thank you for that.’ Lord Darcy spoke with a very stately courtesy. Then he smiled, and laid his hand a moment on the friar’s shoulder; they had known each other for many years, and it was as plain that the friar was moved as that he was unwilling to let it be seen that he was moved. So my Lord went on talking, partly to give him time, partly for sheer delight in talking; for to any captive a listener is as a drink of water to a thirsty man.
‘Yesterday,’ said he, ‘they told me I should die to-day. Well, ’twas a strange thing, Father. At first I could think of two things only, swinging betwixt them like a clock’s pendulum. The one was – “I die – I die 0’ Saturday,” and t’other – “It cannot be I.”’
The priest nodded. He might have spoken, but my Lord was not now to be stopped.
‘Soon,’ he said, ‘why, very soon, in an hour – by the Rood! it was no more – the thing was no longer strange. And then I knew that though I had little time, yet I had to spare for what must be done. For it is indeed a thing remarkable, how few cares trouble a man who is come close to the day of his death.’
‘There is,’ said the friar, ‘one needful care only, and it is that for which I am here.’
The old man, with his heavy pouching cheeks and great belly, was one of those whose souls, strenuous and austere, are masked in fat; abstinence bloated him, penance puffed him out. Only if you looked closely at the red, fleshy face, you could see in its grossness, courage, gentleness and a humble spirit. So now, for all his noisy breathing and purpled face, he had put on dignity as if he had put on a vestment.
Darcy went slowly down on his knees to make his last confession.
That was hardly done when there came a knock at the door.
‘Nunc dimittis, Domine, servum tuum in pace,’ murmured my Lord, whose face, purged of passion by the solemnities and mercies of his late concernments, was still as a carved face on a tomb.
The Lieutenant of the Tower came in. Darcy moved towards the door, but Kingston waved him back. He said there was word from the King’s Grace that my Lord should not die to-day.
‘If not to-day – when?’ Darcy asked, sooner than either of the others had thought he would find his voice. Mr. Kingston did not know.
‘Well,’ said Darcy, and was able to smile, ‘I may yet die in my bed. And yet I care not whether it be so or no.’
But the two could see that he was still shaken by the stress of not knowing when he should die, though that was the very state in which he had passed all his life until yesterday.
So the fat old friar, disregarding Kingston’s gesture towards the door, plumped himself down upon one stool, and my Lord sat upon the other, and when Kingston had gone they were silent for a long time, looking, each of them, at the ashes upon that hearth where Darcy had not expected to see another fire kindled.
*
Wat had seen the window in the roof change from the coping of a well into which you looked upwards and saw only deep darkness and slowly wheeling stars, to a square of faint grey and, at last, of pallid light. He got up and crawled along the loft softly so as not to waken Malle. But she was awake, and, though he scowled and shook his head at her, she followed him down the ladder, and when he got into the street she was beside him. So they went together towards the river, Wat wal
king on the balls of his feet and crabwise, ready to spring away did she try to catch him.
The sky above the houses was invisible, and a cold mist lay close over all; sometimes it moved at a puff of light wind, but for the most part it clung, still and white, to the chimneys and roof-tops, growing thicker and more chilling as they came closer to the Thames.
At the top of the Tower Wharf steps they met some fishermen going up homewards, bare-legged, bare-footed, with their hoods pushed back on their shoulders, carrying the wet, sharply-reeking nets over their shoulders, and dripping creels of fish.
At the foot of the steps, since the tide had already run far out, there was sand, firm, smooth and clean as though this was the first of days, and the world just come new from God’s making. Moored beyond the lowest dropping of the tide lay the fishermen’s boat, and the track of their feet led up from the water’s edge, with here and there a swept patch of sand where a trailing lappet of the nets had dragged behind them. Round about the boat, on the sleek, grey, sleepily swinging water, the gulls sailed, or dozed upon the boat’s gunwhale.
Malle sat down on a rock beside a little pool. The water in the pool was clear almost as the air; the sand at the bottom was sharply ribbed in the semblance of ripples, one ripple following another, and each smooth, regular, perfect – motion translated into form by the cunning, fingerless hands of the tide, which had worked this craftsmanship during the night.
Wat went on towards the water’s edge, following the shallow winding channel which the escaping water had made as it slipped from the brimming pool back to the river. The channel was empty of water now but still marked with the waving lines of its flowing, and edged with tiny cliffs, sharply cut as if built of rock, but all of the cessile sand, and all less than an inch in height.
Down by the water’s edge that same bright brown sand was dark with wetness, yet the wetness was bright too as if it were a shining skin laid over the sand. Wat’s footsteps squeezed it dry and pale for an instant, then, as he passed, the water seeped up again so that there was no trace to show where he had trod. Here and there smooth stones broke the gleaming film, clear cold blue, red with a streak of buff, yellow flawed with green; all watery colours brought to life by water. A little further out the shallowest sliding edge of the receding tide slipped in and out with a hiss, and along this Wat moved slowly, all his life in the soles of his feet to feel the stir of the prawns under the sand, and then to snatch them out and drop them into his canvas pouch for breakfast-time.
Long before he had as many prawns as he wished he heard Malle calling, ‘Wat! Wat! Come!’
He went to her, lagging, and when he was near, would not come within reach of her hands.
She said: ‘There is darkness, and God moving nigh-hand in the darkness.’
Wat made a growling noise in his throat and swung away on one foot. But he could not go. So he stayed to listen, a shoulder hunched between him and her.
Malle said: ‘All the black night, with not one candle left, not one star, they’ve dragged Him with them, and now they have Him to judgement before the dawn comes. The fire’s lit and burning, and there’s a window the blind morning looks through, and another, and that way’s the moon; so day and dark may see the light that made them taken in the hands of men.’
She turned away and looked up to where above the empty strand and the wharf the great bulk of the Tower loomed, huge and sullen in the mist. High up the King’s banner hung dead upon its staff.
‘Man,’ said Malle, ‘would take swords, bows and bills to save Him. And the angels wait to break Heaven and let burning justice and the naked spirit flake down in flame to heat to scorched souls those men that bear God to die, that so they may know their Maker.’
‘But He will not. Look, Wat, Look! There He is, and holdeth in His hands that glass vessel, clear, precious, brimmed full with clean righteousness. So He hath carried it without spilling, through life and now through death. That shining water’s His pure righteousness to wash clean all the world’s sins.’
‘Ah!’ she cried, ‘stay them! Stay them! lest with their swords they shatter the glass, and so the water is spilled, for we need it every drop.’
She looked at Wat, and he cowered away.
‘Sword cannot save righteousness – only spill it for the thirsty ground to drink. And that He knoweth.’
She said: ‘There was the old Lord who came to Marrick saying he was a merchant man. Come and tell him this thing.’
But though the two of them managed to come within the Tower by following a young girl who brought in eggs to the house of Master Partridge of the Mint, they did not come to my Lord Darcy. For near the Beauchamp Tower one of Master Kingston’s men met and questioned them, and set his pikestaff about their shoulders, and drove them, with blows, and much shouting, out of the place again.
*
At the distant noise of that commotion Lord Darcy jerked his head round to listen and drew in his breath sharply. When there was silence again he turned back, but now he smiled bitterly.
‘They should have had my head this morning. By now I had passed, and I was ready to die.’
He brought his fist down on his knee.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I am not ready. Now I must hope to live, and yet look to die. Yea, and if I die, I die for the faith of Christ, for which we of that Pilgrimage took arms; yet, if I die, I die because we Northern men were betrayed by the rest,’ and he began to rail upon the Marquis of Exeter, ‘a sheep,’ he called him, and Lord Montague, ‘that will stumble at any mole-hill, and the other Poles but leaves in the wind.’
‘So now,’ he said, ‘are the King and this Cromwell set higher than ever.’
‘My son—’
Darcy did not let the friar say further. ‘My Father!’ he mocked, and shot out his finger at the other’s face, ‘if you, you the spiritual men, had but called upon all the realm, gentlemen, nobles, and commons, to rise, they had risen, for Holy Church, and Christ, and for righteousness’ sake.’
‘My son,’ said the friar, ‘whether you die to-morrow, or whether you live, put aside from you those thoughts. For I tell you surely, that’s not God’s way.’
‘Not—?’ cried Darcy; and then, while the friar held his eyes, he grumbled angrily, ‘Is it not then? Well, an’ if it be not? Tell me how, then? What other way? How? How? Is it not foolishness to think—?’
He did not finish, for the old friar stood up.
‘“Stultitia Dei,”’ he said. ‘It is foolishness. It is God’s foolishness that is wiser than men.’
Darcy did not move nor speak for a long time. At last he raised his head and the friar saw something that was almost a smile on his face.
‘Well,’ said my Lord lightly, but as men speak lightly before a last, hopeless fight, ‘I am not of so holy a mind as to be able to take God’s way. But,’ he said, and met the friar’s eyes, ‘I’ll not grudge to die. It may be He will accept that for service.’
Then he stretched out his hand, and said good-bye.
The Chronicle of Thomas, Lord Darcy, ends here.
May 24
When Gib came to Lord Privy Seal’s house in Throgmorton Street, and asked for my Lord’s chaplain, he was told that there were orders that he should be brought up to my Lord himself. ‘Ha!’ thought Gib, as he went after the servant through a big hall, and along a passage. ‘So my Lord has taken note of my writings. He would not have sent for me, but to commend me.’
The servant let him into a small, pleasant, sunny room with a big painted mappemonde on the wall, all scarlet and blue, with ships here and there upon the seas, and cities, walled and bristling with towers and spires. At the table sat Lord Privy Seal, and his two hands lay upon a page of writing that Gib knew very well, for it was his own.
‘This,’ said Cromwell, not even waiting till the servant had shut the door, ‘this will not serve,’ and he rapped the backs of his fingers on the page.
Gib was so surprised that he fairly gaped.
‘No one
,’ said my Lord, ‘would laugh at this that you call “An Interlude of the Seven Deadly Sins”.’
‘They are not meant to laugh,’ cried Gib, angry now.
‘If they laugh not, they listen not,’ said Cromwell, and threw the papers across the table towards Gib. ‘Mend it,’ said he, ‘or I’ll not buy.’
That was all. He waved his hand, and the big diamond on his forefinger blazed as the sun caught it. Then Gib was outside the door, and raging.
May 28
Until the bent, sour-looking little man’s hand furtively twitched her sleeve July had not realized that this morning, wherever she went, he had been near. Now, as she turned and looked at him, she knew it, and fright seized her; but before she could call out to Mat who went in front, the man muttered, ‘Word from him you love.’ That for July meant one only; she never doubted whom, nor hesitated what she should do.
‘Mat,’ she said, ‘Mat,’ and when he turned, ‘I forgot, at the Cow in Boots, to buy cardamons. Go back quickly and buy two ounces.’ When Mat had gone – ‘Now,’ said she to the old man – ‘Quick!’
But he would not be quick, objecting that the Cheap was too crowded for such privy business as his, so they turned into Milk Street, and there, under a grey white cloud of a flowering cherry tree that branched above them over a wall, he pulled out of his doublet some writings.
‘A letter?’ cried July, ‘I can’t read writings.’ But her hand stretched out to take it, for at least his hands had touched the paper.
‘Aye,’ said Ned Stringer, putting her fingers by. ‘For the King, and for Privy Seal,’ and he told her, sharply and angrily, as if he hated the whole business, that yon fellow, the traitor Aske, in the Tower, had written to them begging mercy.
‘Mercy?’ July whispered it. She had never thought of mercy.
‘Aye. But he’s stiff-necked. I told him, “Down on your knees to ’em. Confess your fault. Beg! Pray! Howl if you will. What matter so you scape the pains you dread when they cut you down.”’ And in July’s sight the man made an awful pantomime of the executioner’s business; and then stared at her, and grinned in her face.
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